Calories that you drink

With the competition season under way, making weight can be a really big part of competing. Something that is really easy to forget in this situation, is the calories that you drink not just eat. Taking this into account will be an important part of making your weight.

At a very basic level unless you are going to be drinking a big thick milkshake, most drinks on their own will pass pretty quickly through your tummy. So it is pretty hard to feel full. There is the potential to feel bloated if you have drunk a lot of fizzy drinks. But overall you are not going to get the same full feeling that is the signal to stop when you are eating food.

This means that you can drink way more than you can eat. In the UK there has a big deal been made about fruit juices. These will still contain the fruit sugars but not the stuff that makes you feel full. So you could probably easily drink the juice of 6 oranges, but it would be hard to eat 6 full oranges.

Even though fruit juices are considered healthy it can be easy to drink a lot of the stuff in one go. So if you really like fruit juices, why don’t you consider adding water? A quarter of a glass of juice topped off with water, will reduce the calories that you are drinking but still give you the fruit juice taste that you enjoy.

If you are like me you will enjoy your daily coffee or tea, both of these on their own have virtually no calories. However once you start making it a Latte a Mocha or simply adding milk or sugar, you are increasing the calorific content of these drinks. Hot Chocolate will have considerably more. A recently published list by Action on Sugar can be found here, it shows how much sugar your hot drinks actually have in them.

We all work hard and there is nothing better after a hard week at work that a nice drink. However alcohol contains nearly the same calories per gram as fat (9 calories per gram). Plus if you have a drink with a meal your body recognises its by-products as toxins and chooses to break these down first over the nutrients in food. So when you body eventually gets round to metabolising the food, it may no longer require the calories, so they get stored as fat. As an older I am pleased about a classic ‘beer belly’, that so many guys my age have. You can find out the calories there is a really good alcoholic drink calories calculator here

This article is not meant to condemn any of this drinks, we all have to enjoy our life and treats help that. But having the information to help you when you are going through that weight cut period can be really helpful.